Wild do an about-face and send Brett Bulmer back to juniors

Marco Scandella is a major part of the Wild's youth movement this season.

Brett Bulmer isn't.

Six days after Chuck Fletcher said Bulmer had landed a job, the Wild general manager did an about-face and returned Bulmer to his junior team Monday. Bulmer, 19, who had no goals and three assists in nine games for the Wild, will rejoin Kelowna of the Western Hockey League.

"It's hard to understand," Bulmer said on the team's website podcast, "but it's probably good in the long run, I guess."

"At this point, the best thing for him, for his long-term development, is to get back and play junior hockey and play big role on his team," Fletcher said.

What changed?

"These situations are always fluid," Fletcher said.

Three days after Fletcher said Bulmer was "a part of our team" - and with the former second-round draft pick closing in on his 10th NHL game - coach Mike Yeo took Bulmer out of the lineup. Had he played in a 10th game, the first year of his three-year contract would have kicked in.

Bulmer looked good during his NHL audition, Fletcher said, but his ice time was about 11 minutes a game and expected to decrease.

"It just doesn't make sense to keep a 19-year-old player around an NHL team when he's not playing regularly," Fletcher said, "so the decision was simple."

Yeo said Bulmer needs to become stronger and fine-tune his game, "and it's going to be tough for him to do that with eight to 10 minutes of ice time.

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Ice time for Scandella, on the other hand, has been solid. In Saturday's 1-0 win over the Detroit Red Wings, he played 20 minutes, 23 seconds, contributing two shots on goal and one takeaway.

Scandella began to look like a fixture in the Minnesota lineup a year ago before he was sidelined by a concussion when hit in the head by a puck on Jan 14. He returned to the ice for four games before the end of the season but seemed to be troubled. In his final game, he was on the ice for less than five minutes.

It has been a different story this season. Although Scandella, 21, is one of four youngsters playing on the Wild blue line, he has been averaging more than 21 minutes a game and has one goal and numerous scoring chances. Yeo had Scandella with Jared Spurgeon and Justin Falk with Nate Prosser for two of his defensive pairings against Detroit and raved about the play of all four.

"A lot of these kids have been playing well," Fletcher said, adding that even after Bulmer's departure the Wild have eight players with less than a full season of NHL experience. "It's a young roster. It's been fun so far to watch 'em compete and hold their own."

No one has held his own better than Scandella, a 6-foot-3, 208-pound defenseman from Montreal. Although he has never been a big offensive presence, Scandella has shown no reluctance to carry the puck deep into the opponent's zone, especially on the power play, while also showing he can be a physical force in his own zone.

"He's got such an upside," Wild radio commentator and former NHL defenseman Tom Reid said Monday. "He might become one of the better defensemen in the league some day."

Scandella demonstrated his skill level Saturday on his one takeaway, which came on a penalty kill against none other than Red Wings all-star Pavel Datsyuk. Scandella rode Datsyuk off, corralled the puck and sent it up the ice to a teammate, resulting in a scoring chance.

"Playing hard, sometimes you make some good plays," Scandella said.

Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Johan Franzen, Nicklas Lidstrom, Denny Cleary and others make the Red Wings one of the offensive powers of the NHL.

"They're great players," Scandella said, "but everyone's human. You know what, we're all playing in the NHL for a reason, so I'm not intimidated at all. No one is in this room."

Prosser and Falk moved in because of injuries to Clayton Stoner and Greg Zanon. Both missed practice Monday, and neither is expected to be available to play against the Red Wings.

Goaltender Josh Harding, who shut out the Wings, is scheduled to play again in the Minnesota nets.

And Bulmer is expected to play his next game for the Kelowna Rockets on Nov. 4 against the Portland Winterhawks.

"All my teammates down there, they're going to be super happy," he said. "I'm going to do everything I can to be a big lift for that team."